Service rather than Indiference

It could be said that Woodrow Wilson’s ideas are like a work of art. While the artist lived, the world was slow to embrace the art, but after the artist’s death, the world recognized the greatness of the work. Like with a work of art, interpretation would be highly subjective creating great potential for debate and disagreement.

In October 1916, Edward M. “Colonel” House, an American diplomat, stated, “We are part of the world…nothing that concerns the whole world can be indifferent to us.” During the same month, President Wilson stated that the United States would need to “serve the world.”[1] In order to provide this service, Wilson believed that a change in how international relations was conducted would be needed. It was vital that the old system of alliances be replaced by a new system of international cooperation.

Wilson was correct in the need for a new world order, and despite a growing isolationist movement in the United States, there would be no turning back from greater international political involvement. At the end of the Second World War, the United States played a dominant role in the international political body that was created to replace the failed League of Nations. While the United Nations would both be valued and criticized, it would, through accident or plan, become a way for nations to work together in war-torn regions of the world. Conflict and hostility might not have been eradicated through international cooperation, but service to the world’s population through peacekeeping efforts did, in some measure, fulfill the progressive ideas of the early twentieth-century. Certainly, it became harder for any powerful nation to remain indifferent to the concerns of the world.

[1] George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 407.